WOONSOCKET — The Little Red School House Award was presented to the Woonsocket Elementary School for implementing the most significant, innovative and successful education program or project by the School Administrators of South Dakota (SASD).

The Woonsocket Elementary School set a goal to increase achievement scores in reading for the 2023-24 school year. The idea was to create a reading intervention program called Flight School.

Woonsocket started the year with an assessment tool called FastBridge to evaluate all their K-6 students. After the assessment, Woonsocket used the data to determine which students needed to receive extra reading instruction.

An intervention program was created where every morning for 30 minutes, 40-plus students with the largest “gap” would go into small groups to receive instruction on the specific skill they struggled with.

The on-level students attended Walking Club, which gave them the opportunity to exercise for 15 minutes and to help the younger students with the remaining 15 minutes.

The teachers and staff at Woonsocket are committed to these 30-minutes sessions to help the students improve. The flight school has been so successful that they have shared this with other school districts.

Woonsocket believes that intervention programs like this one will bring more success to students, not only in reading, but across the board.